RUTHFULLY YOURS

I respectfully dissent from National Review’s Wednesday-evening editorial, which derided Newt Gingrich as not merely flawed but unfit for consideration as the GOP presidential nominee. The Editors further gave the back of the hand to the bids of two other prominent conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann — a judgment that is simply inexplicable in light of the frivolousness of its reasoning and of the Editors’ embrace of Jon Huntsman, a moderate former Obama-administration official, as a serious contender.

The editorial surprised me, as it did many readers. I am now advised that the timing was driven by the editorial’s inclusion in the last edition of the magazine to be published this year, which went to press on Wednesday. The Editors believe, unwisely in my view, that before the first caucuses and primaries begin in early January, it is important to make known their insights — not merely views about the relative merits of the candidates but conclusions that some candidates are no longer worthy of having their merits considered. Like many other voters, I haven’t settled on a candidate. What I want at this very early stage is information about the candidates so I can consider them, not a presumptuous and premature pronouncement that good conservatives do not even rate consideration.

Regarding former Speaker Gingrich, I have no objection to the cataloguing of any candidate’s failings, and Newt has certainly made his share of mistakes. But there ought to be balance — balance between a candidate’s failings and his strengths, balance between the treatment of that candidate and of his rivals. The editorial fails on both scores.

Gingrich’s virtues are shortchanged — his great accomplishment in balancing the federal budget is not even mentioned, an odd omission in an election that is primarily about astronomical spending. His downsides are exaggerated in two unbecoming ways.

Let me preface the first by conceding that I am as concerned as anyone by the former Speaker’s walks on the wild side — though I think they are outweighed by his unique gifts. Like other conservatives, I was disappointed this week by his dig at Governor Romney’s success at Bain Capital — we can’t both fight to restore economic liberty and talk like Occupy Wall Street agitators when someone practices it. I accept Gingrich’s explanation that the remarks were a bad attempt at cutting humor — in reaction to withering taunts from the Romney campaign — and are not a reflection of his views. But he has to know that such outbursts exemplify his famed impulsiveness, giving his detractors a chance to say, “I told you so.”

Nevertheless, if the Editors were enterprising enough, they could just as easily write a similar editorial, with the same tone of alarm, about, say, Governor Romney or Governor Huntsman. Their heresies, too, are notorious — and their explanations no more satisfying. I am not suggesting that such editorials be written — particularly with respect to Romney who, like Gingrich, would make a superb president. I am just saying that it could be done. For the Editors to single out Gingrich for this kind of raking — particularly when his accomplishments in government dwarf anything his rivals have managed to achieve — fails the test of judgment conservatives expect from National Review. The transcendent mission of our founder calls for explicating principled conservative arguments about the great issues of the day, not “winnowing” intra-GOP primaries. I appreciate, as Jonah Goldberg recounts, that the magazine has made endorsements in some prominent contests throughout its history. In this instance, however, we are talking about clearing a seven-person field — eliminating strong conservatives, preserving spots for two moderates (and one solid conservative who is a very long long-shot) — before a single vote has been cast.

Second is the personal stuff. As the Editors point out, Newt has been a major figure in our politics for a very long time. We all know the marital history, and we all know it is relevant. There is, however, no need to dwell on it beyond saying it is obviously an issue voters must weigh — though hardly the top of the list. Yet the Editors make it the top of the list. It is Count One of their indictment, and they make sure to spell out that we’re talking not only about divorces but also about multiple marriages to “mistresses.” Later, just in case we’ve been too dense to get the Newt-is-a-betrayal-waiting-to-happen point, the Editors conclude by admonishing Republicans “to reject a hasty marriage to Gingrich, which would risk dissolving in acrimony” — the lasting impression they decided was worth emblazoning in big bold letters at the top of the homepage all day long. This has all the subtlety of Obama’s class-warfare tropes. I’m not contending that there’s no there there, but c’mon. I don’t want to cringe reading an editorial written by friends of mine any more than I want to wince hearing Newt talk about Bain Capital.

And as for Gingrich’s Republican “colleagues,” whom the Editors applaud for ejecting him from the speakership, no one can deny that they had their reasons. But is there not another side of that story worth telling? In the seven years they controlled Congress after Gingrich left, didn’t these esteemed colleagues have something of a “weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas”? Under a Republican president, they added over $3 trillion to the federal deficit, shunned conservative policy in favor of Beltway influence-peddling, and so damaged the GOP brand that we ended up, first, with an electoral rout that lost the majority Gingrich had worked years to forge, and then, with Obama. How much should I really care that Newt’s fabulous colleagues think his reemergence would be a disaster for Republicans? Lest these characters forget, it is the Tea Party and President Obama’s radicalism that have put them back in the saddle — 2010 was not a merit promotion; they were the only alternative in town.

The 2012 election will be about a government careering toward financial ruin, and Gingrich is the candidate who can say he actually wrestled the federal budget into balance — by comparison, Gov. Jon Huntsman, who the Editors say rates “serious consideration,” blew out Utah’s budget, raising government spending by a whopping 33 percent. In an election about the imperative to repeal Obamacare, Gingrich is the candidate who helped defeat Hillarycare — by comparison, Governor Romney ushered in a health-care system that became a model for Obamacare (and he stubbornly continues to insist that it was a great achievement — the main reason he can’t crack the 25 percent ceiling in most polls). In an election that is about grappling with budget-busting entitlements, Gingrich is the candidate who reformed welfare — which, the Editors acknowledge, is “the most successful social policy of recent decades.”

Is Newt guilty of so many missteps that the tremendous good he has done is outweighed? I don’t think so, but that is what the primary process is about. Although I think NR should stay out of the endorsement/disqualification business at this early stage of the GOP race, I would not complain if my colleagues were simply assessing both sides of the ledger and deciding that other candidates are preferable to Gingrich. But to conclude that he is unfit, as the Editors do, is not only wrong; it is a gross exaggeration. NR absolutely should give conservatives the information they deserve — good and bad — to make an intelligent choice. Moreover, while I don’t subscribe to this view, it is certainly defensible to argue that beating Obama is so vital that nominating a surer winner trumps nominating a potentially better president. But to declare, as the Editors do, that Gingrich should be “exclude[d] from consideration” is an unfair evaluation of his candidacy; more significantly, it is a disservice to conservatives and other Republicans, who are more than capable of assessing his worthiness vel non.

In an even worse excess, the Editors shift from skewering Speaker Gingrich to a peremptory dismissal of two other admirable conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. Perry has been a tremendously successful governor of Texas — a state that has experienced job growth while the national economy, under Obama, languishes in a near depression (or is it a “jobless recovery”?). Like Governor Perry, Representative Bachmann of Minnesota is a champion of limited government in the framework of the original Constitution. She has fought President Obama tooth and nail on Obamacare, the national debt, and other crucial issues — often holding to the fire the feet of a spaghetti-spined Republican establishment.

Playing to the cheap seats, the Editors mock Perry’s deficiencies as a debater — he needs “to spend much of his time untying his own tongue.” Do we really need to turn National Review into American Idol — and over trivia that pales beside Perry’s impressive executive record? Bachmann is a superb expositor of conservative principles, but the Editors are in a huff over her occasional resort to hyperbole — most infamously, overstating the dangers of Gardasil in an otherwise devastatingly competent critique of Perry’s vaccination mandate. Such rhetorical gaffes seem pretty tame in a field of candidates whose flaws run substantive and deep. And were she to win the nomination, President Obama wouldn’t be able to exploit this vulnerability — even if he had the expert advice of Jon Corzine and of all the “corpse”-men in the 57 states, armed to the teeth with every breathalyzer the English embassy could find.

The Editors also want to drum Ron Paul out of the field. I think this is unwise, too, but not worth dwelling on. Paul has zero chance of being nominated, and the Editors give good reasons for discrediting his candidacy — although I think they’d have done well to clarify that when they refer to “the movement he leads,” they are not talking about the Tea Party (as opposed to an extremist anti-government fringe that likes to represent itself as the Tea Party). I’ll stick with Perry and Bachmann. The Editors’ position on this pair of good conservatives is astonishing when one compares it to their claim that Governor Huntsman “deserve[s] serious consideration.”

Here is the totality of their argument: “Governor Huntsman has a solid record, notwithstanding his sometimes glib foreign-policy pronouncements; his main weakness is his apparent inability, so far, to forge a connection with conservative voters outside Utah.”

Seriously? When you ask conservatives and Republicans what they think of Governor Huntsman’s bid, you don’t get a bunch of psycho-babble about “inability to forge a connection.” You get, “Why would Republicans nominate a guy Obama picked for an important role in his administration?” Huntsman was the president’s ambassador to China — a fact the Editors, remarkably, omit. So, when it comes to Bachmann, the Editors think “anti-vaccine rumors” are a disqualifier; on Huntsman, however, somehow the little matter of his service in the Obama administration doesn’t even rate a mention. To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything dishonorable about Huntsman’s service. But we’re not talking about whether he should be ostracized; we’re talking about whether he is a viable candidate in a race Republicans must frame as a referendum on the Obama administration. How bad can the administration be if we’re going to recruit our nominee from it?

And Huntsman’s “solid record”? Maybe he has one if we’re gauging him by Republican-establishment standards. After all, as Utah’s governor, Huntsman was a spendaholic and global-warming alarmist who was lax on illegal immigration and favored a government mandate that citizens purchase health insurance. Does it get any more mainstream GOP than that? In 2009, Huntsman opined that the problem with Obama’s failed Keynesian stimulus was that it wasn’t big enough — it should have been $1 trillion (gee, I wonder why President Obama figured he’d be a good fit). On foreign policy — a topic on which even the Editors chide Huntsman despite their amazingly generous grading curve — he appears to be a transnational progressive of the Council on Foreign Relations bent who never met a treaty he didn’t like. Much can be said about all of that, but it is not exactly a “solid record” by conservative standards as National Review used to apply them.

This is not to say Governor Huntsman would not be a dramatic improvement over President Obama. As the Club for Growth notes, his irresponsible profligacy on the spending side was mitigated by sensible tax policies. He is clearly a very bright, articulate fellow — and he was overwhelmingly reelected governor of a very conservative state. But how could the beacon of the conservative movement find that he merits serious consideration but Gingrich, Perry, and Bachmann do not? That is absurd.

They all merit serious consideration: those four, as well as Governor Romney, with his significant up- and downsides, and Rick Santorum — who, along with Romney and Huntsman, is judged fit by the Editors to enter the trio to which they would whittle us down. When reliable conservatism and valuable experience are combined, Senator Santorum is as solid as any in the bunch. But given the Editors’ professed belief that the likelihood of beating Obama is such a crucial consideration, how odd that they single out “lack of executive experience” as his downside. Manifestly, Santorum’s credibility barrier is the electoral drubbing he suffered as an incumbent senator. He surely has a case that he can surmount this hurdle: Pennsylvania is a blue state, 2006 was a very bad year for Republicans, many great leaders have lost elections, and the passing years have proved him prescient on the cultural and foreign-policy issues that matter. But while Santorum could still catch a wave, as several of the other candidates have, it is the one-sided loss of his seat, not want of executive experience, that has dogged him.

The endorsement business and its flipside, the disqualification business, are bad ideas for this illustrious institution. That is a point I tried to make before the 2010 midterm elections. There is no avoiding the fact that we live in a practical, tactical world. Personality has its place and electability matters. But National Review has endured as a beacon of our movement for over a half-century because the power of conservative ideas can trump personality and dramatically alter voters’ notions about who is electable. If we lose that conviction — if we convince ourselves that conservative candidates, effectively arguing conservative ideas, cannot persuade a center-right country to reject the most radical Leftist ever to occupy the Oval Office — we are nowhere.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.